It's Purty~ (Sony Walkman NW-A3000 20 GB)

Member Name: Dem546

Product:	Sony Walkman NW-A3000 20 GB
Date:	07/08/06 (186 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Battery life, Ease of use, Stylish

Disadvantages: Connect software is absolutely horrid to those with big librarys

I got this as a birthday gift near the start of the year, back then I felt the price was a little steep but at the sametime reasonable because of the Sony nametag. Main reason I thought it was steep was because there was no colour screen just a basic LCD and the features were minimal and basic (Playlists, Shuffle, Repeat) although I feel most people wouldn't mind anything more than the basic features so it's not much of a disadvantage. But it did have features like intelligent shuffle which allowed it to shuffle with only certain rated songs (all songs rated 5 stars) and songs from certain year etc.

Battery Life - When I first got it, charged it up and put some music on it. I just started listening to it to check the battery, I listened to it the whole day and when I went to sleep I still had quite a bit of battery left. I was quite amazed by it simply because compared to alot of others they'd not last near this long and gave this a major plus. I'm not sure how long exactly it lasted but it was near to 18 hours if not more.

Ease of use - Beautifully simplistic. Volume control on the right side as a small slider, play and navigation (skip also) on the left under the screen with a Options and back button to the right. Hold button on the top near the earphone jack with a power on button on the left which has a backlight which lights up orange when active (browsing through the menus). The initial menu on the screen when switched on is 9 icons, you just navigate by using the arrow keys around the play button and use the play button to select. Press back whenever you want to go to a previous menu and press options if you want more.. uhhm options. :D

In play mode it displays Title, Artist, Album and Genre with a your usual progress bar/battery/repeaton/shuffleon/ icon at the bottom. You have the choice of letting it just display it constantly or have it switch to a nice screensaver or a sleep mode which it'll switch to after around 15 seconds of inactivity. In order to switch it off you just hold the options button then it'll switch itself off with a pleasant 'See you later' message. When you switch it back on again using the Play button it'll start off from the exact moment in the song you were last listening to.

Stylish - Not much to say, nice stylish design, nothing is visible including the screen unless you're navigating. Even then it looks like the menus are appearing on the plastic on the front of the player while it's actually a LCD screen further back.

Connect software - May I start by saying my computer isn't exactly great (P4 3.2Ghz/756MB RAM) but this software seems to hate me. To transfer your music over it seems you need to use this software but the problem with it is the interface for the program is quite resource intensive on a normal computer. If you're transfering a few songs then it's ok, it'll chug along fine but if you're transfering a large library (anything from 100-2000 songs) then it'll usually throw itself into a 'Not Responding' mood and takes a while to snap out of it. Also, with large librarys the transfer seems to take a while, and the whole percentage done thing doesn't seem to help as it flickers around alot if you're transfering alot of music. Once it was stuck at 80% for around 30 mins even though the program was responsive then quickly jumped to 99% and finished.

Sadly if I had the choice to go back I'd choose a different player just due to the software. I can see where it'd not be a problem to those with smaller librarys but for those with large librarys it can be a large annoyance.

Just as a footnote that I found to be a great advantage for this little player. The player can be used as a removable hard drive as when it connects to a computer it installs itself as if it's a thumb drive. So it's easy to just plug in and transfer things over to it. Ideal for say a college student that likes to transfer his/her work from their college/home computer. Or those that work with computers as it makes it easy to transfer data between them.

I'm sure there's plenty of people that would like to know if it could do that as quite a few other mp3 players are locked and require software to hack past it.

Added: If there's anything else you want me to mention then make a comment and I'll say what I can.

Summary: Great player in general but the software can be an annoyance.

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